He thought for sure Granma would open her eyes in the casket, her cheeks were so pink and terrible.
If Tom Thebus got to be his father what would his boy do for a father? White polo shirt and white shorts.
Peggy Copan told him that girls had to sit down to pee. Why was that?
Helen Copan had to go and get dressed two hours before she went dancing with the lifeguard. Two hours! It’s because ladies have to put on under their dresses all those things with straps and hooks and metal things.
“But all Italian ships are white.”
A whole pack of paper napkins: Chez Freddy, Manny’s Rest, Hi-Top, WigWam, Harry and Mary’s, Bluebird, Seven Gables, Blue Front, Red Apple Rest, Mom’s. Granma’s thin belt zipping around in an arc to catch him behind the knees.
Charlie Taylor said his mother had hair all over her hole, he saw it once. What did ladies have to have hair for? Not Mom! His birdie felt itchy when he thought of it.
Guineas were all riffraff and so were the shanty Irish. He was both of them.
His other gramp gave him a funny-looking thing he picked off a tree and Mom told him it was a fig.
Uncle Joe walked back and forth in the living room with his hat on: “Goddamma crip’ thinksa now he’sa the bigga boss!”
Delaney showed him a picture in a little book with Ella Cinders and she had a man’s big birdie in her mouth and big drops of sweat were falling off her face and he felt weak and funny in his head. “Ladies like to suck off a man’s cock.” Cock was the real name for a birdie.
He and Mom visited some old lady cousin or something on a dark winter afternoon and sat in the kitchen in the dim light of a kerosene lamp. Tea and stale cookies. “My God! Nothing cheaper than an old skinflint of a shanty spinster.” On the way home they stopped into Holsten’s and had hot chocolate with whipped cream on it. He wasn’t to tell Granma. That night on the couch in the dark front room he heard Mom say that she might have sure picked a winner but God knows what’s right is right and she had the best when she had anything and that if she’d married some Pat or Mike she’d have lived in a coalbin as God was her judge. “That’s right! Praise the greaseball mucky-muck to your own mother’s face! Jesus, Mary and Joseph!”
A big cardboard box bulging with his toys, the zeppelin down at the bottom but he didn’t play with it anymore.
On the first day of school, Miss Rush pulled him out of a line of children marching in a circle. He cried and didn’t want to go back to school. “You marching goop! Now, sit down in the corner until you can be good!” He had only just been marching around in a circle. Mom said she was an old dried-up battle-ax. She hugged and kissed him and squeezed orange juice and the next day they put him in Miss O’Reilly’s class instead.
The box had two smiling children on it and Mom told him the words said “The Gold Dust Twins.” He learned to read right away.
Miss Rush was round all the way around her body but her legs were skinny and she wore big black shoes. She probably wore a corset like Granma.
Mrs. Schmidt had a big round shape. And her titties were really big, that was a really dirty word, like cock.
They took him in to see Granma at the hospital and she was all grey and took his hand. Her hand felt like a bunch of cold bones and she didn’t have any teeth!
Jimmy Kenny came to the funeral parlor all dressed in his cop suit with a gun and everything. “She was a good woman, Marie. It’s all for the best.” Mom told Gramp it was a wonder the big gawm could spare the time. “Coming to pay his respects in his uniform! What riffraff!” Frankie Caffrey came in his blue serge Confirmation suit and said the Rosary, the thick ignorant Mick.
He got a new box, Super Suds, and threw his zeppelin away.
One summer evening while it was still light and Mom was talking on the front stoop he got up for water. “The Magrinos’ll be around all smiles before you know it looking for your straight Democratic vote.” On a chair he saw something pink with those straps with metal things hanging off it and flushed. But it was small and soft and stretched when you pulled it, so even with the straps and all it wasn’t like Granma’s.
Who made the world? God made the world.
Babies sucked their mothers’ titties? Johnny McNamee said that all ladies had their titties full of milk, like cows. That was the funniest thing he ever heard.
Kickie Delaney was dirty and he felt like with those kids Cookie and Honey when they took him in the garage. “A lady’s hole is a cunt.” Cunt sounded like it had hair all over it.
He told Mom that the Alpine marquee said if you could only cook. “Did you read that?” She bought him Black Beauty in the five-and-ten.
Tom Thebus told him that boys had to be strong and clean to grow up to be men so they shouldn’t touch themselves. He didn’t know what he meant.
At Steeplechase in the place where air from the floor blows ladies’ dresses up he blushed and didn’t know where to look. And those straps were to hold up a lady’s stockings!
He finished Black Beauty in bed with the chicken pox and cried so that he had to wipe his glasses.
In Caught Caught Blackwell once, all the kids quit because they couldn’t catch him, the last kid out.
Gramp got him an Army.45 cap gun for his ninth birthday right after they moved in with him and Granma.
Buttons that said something he couldn’t understand, green ribbons attached, one had a tiny white stone pipe pinned to the ribbon.
Mom bought him Skippy by Percy Crosby for his ninth birthday and he read it four times in a row straight through. He didn’t know any kids like that.
Granma shaking the Brooklyn Eagle at Mom: “Are you going to let this goddamned bimbo get away with this? Mrs. Recco? Mrs. Recco?”
After the lady from the Relief came to the house Mom cried and they moved in with Granma a few weeks later.
He heard Mom say that she had a crackerjack lawyer now, Aloysius Moran, “a black Irishman smart as a Jew.”
He got to know the kids on Senator Street but it was the same thing all over again with playing ball. “This new four-eyed kid can’t catch.”
Mom stopped working at the steam table.
He saw Tom Thebus touch Mom low on her back, almost on the heinie, when everybody was going in to supper, she turned around quick all red in the face, and gave him a little push.
He joined the library and got a book about a caveman and one called Penrod. He didn’t know any kids like that either.
“The son of a bitch is out on Gerritsen Avenue pretty as you please with that tramp!” Gramp was supposed to do something about it or something.
Kickie said that ladies had their holes between their legs, not in their stomachs.
He started crying in a movie about Tarzan and Daddy took him home and on the way bought him Charms.
The bookmaker asked Mom if he could help her through some slush at the corner and she made believe she didn’t hear him.
Mom slapped him across the face so quick that nobody saw it when they left Granma’s grave but he didn’t remember what for.
Rhoda Sandgren wet herself right in her seat in school and all the pee ran down on the floor. He laughed like the other kids but he felt really sorry for her. Later he thought of what Kickie had told him about ladies’ holes.
He kept missing the ball in a catch with Uncle Tom and wanted to cry.
Georgie Olsen told him in the schoolyard that his mother had to fuck to make him get born and he hit him on the head with his wooden pencil case and Georgie knocked his glasses off. They told Miss Lanchantin they were fooling around.